Researching the Riviera

Just over a year ago my husband, daughter, and I were sitting on a cliff-top terrace in brilliant sunshine, savouring a gourmet lunch - scant food, artistically prepared, and way too expensive - with the ever-changing blues of the Mediterranean lapping at the bleached rocks below. Considering itself the most luxurious in Europe, The Hotel du Cap - Eden Roc at the southern tip of Cap d’Antibes, boasts about the many celebrities that have stayed there. At the prices they charge, only the super-rich can afford to!

We hadn’t come to ogle stars - and didn’t recognize anyone famous, although the Cannes Film Festival was just a week away - but were watched suspiciously by staff, who wouldn’t let us film even though we explained that my daughter was doing a documentary and was not paparazzi. The manager gave me short shrift when I requested some historical information, since the hotel is mentioned in my novels, shoving a piece of paper into my hands and refusing to answer questions. Could we take photos? Absolutely not! Good thing we had before asking. The staff were self-important and quietly disdainful to “nobodies” like us, although they seemed to fawn over others. Noticing a good many of the planet’s most expensive cars in the parking lot, I’m certain the staff are forever mindful of who’s who. 

The reason for our visit was to see the place where some of my characters dine when staying nearby in their own villa, and because I had just read about how some Americans helped to make the hotel and the Riviera popular in the 1920s - something that will be explored in Book 3 of my Muskoka Novels.

In the early days, the French Riviera was a winter retreat for the wealthy, but shut down during the heat of the summer.  Americans Sara and Gerald Murphy convinced the hotel to remain open one summer, in essence renting it, and invited friends to stay there with them - Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Picasso among them. So beguiled were the Murphys with Cap d’ Antibes, that they bought and then built their own villa there.

So it was exciting to see the places I had read about, to stroll the small beach at La Garoupe, which Gerald Murphy had virtually created by cleaning out the seaweed and daily raking the sand, and thus feel a connection to the past that I will write about. 

I think it’s ironic that now the Hotel du Cap - Eden Roc closes for the winter!

The perks of research

A year ago I was in France, driving along the dramatic coastline between Boulogne and Calais, wishing the rain would stop. The colourful fields and yellow gorse were a delight after the drab April browns of Ontario, but the weather wasn’t a lot warmer. Yet I hadn’t come for sunshine. This was a research trip.

On an endlessly snowy day in February, I had been struggling with descriptions of the Calais area where some of my characters work during the First World War. I scoured the Internet for photos, spent plenty of time on Google Earth trying to get a feeling for the landscape, read descriptions by people who had been there at the time, but wasn’t satisfied I really knew what it looked like. So I told my family we had to go to France. Springtime in Paris! No persuasion required and the VISA card had lots of room.

When the rain finally stopped and we were able to walk the beaches at Caps Blanc-Nez and Gris-Nez, and the dunes at Sangatte, I realized how right I had been that I needed to be on location to get a true feeling of the countryside and the sea. And I experienced first-hand the gale-force winds that sandpaper your skin and which people kept mentioning in memoirs. The imposing cliff at Cap Blanc-Nez can’t be fully appreciated from photos, like the one above, and the hilliness of that stretch of coastline was a surprise. Since my characters drive ambulances along here, that was important to know.

Wimereux was a delight, with plenty of Victorian buildings still in existence. I have characters staying in the same small hotel that we enjoyed, since I found a postcard of it from that era, and realize that, except for its name, it has hardly changed. Seeing one of the villas that had been used as an officers’ hospital during the war was also an exciting connection to the past.

I could have spent more than five days exploring this area - we only went as far south as Le Touquet, and hope some time to go to Normandy (for WW2) - but our next stop was the Riviera, where it was warm and sunny. My excuse for this part of the trip was that I have a character who owns a villa in Cap d’Antibes, so we explored that and found the perfect location.

I know that my characters will visit here - often! - and have to admit that I would be thrilled to join them. The exotic vegetation and masses of flowers blooming in the generous sunshine, the rich blues and turquoises of the sea set against the snow-capped Mediterranean Alps were food for a hungry soul. Imagine people actually living here!